Made out of bitumen-impregnated paper, this
cruet set of concertina fans won’t cool anyone off.
Hanging like three little piupiu on the wall,
patterned by kowhaiwhai shapes and titled after
an American torch song, the installed work gives
a wave in the direction of the artist’s Ngai Tahu
ancestry while fanning the flames of land loss
grievance. Contributing to a content trickling
down from the Māori love story explaining the
origin of the Waiau and Clarence Rivers in the
South Island, the artist works the construction
association inherent in her material. Once called
tar paper, the basic black builder’s paper cut-out
is simultaneously doing steel-capped heavy duty
and pirouetting as lightweight decoration. It is
meant to form a waterproof membrane in a roof
or walls but, carved up by a stanley knife, it
makes an alluring play of light and shadows.

As Nobel prize-winning author Toni Morrison
knew when she titled her 1981 novel Tar Baby,
the Uncle Remus fable has come to refer to a
sticky situation or a difficult problem which is
only aggravated by attempts to solve it; tar
paper is a perfect metaphor for Treaty issues in
Aotearoa. Reconciliation chimes in with the
lament known from the well-known lyrics of the
song that lends a title to the work, “Now you say
you’re sorry for being so untrue/ Well, you can
cry me a river, cry me a river, I cried a river over
you.” Tears have an established place in Māori
design. In tututuku weaving, the albatross tears
pattern makes for a descending stair shape
while in kowhaiwhai, the roimata shape is
symbolic of sadness. Each of Hutchinson’s folded
forms presents a single tear drop, arranged in
formation so that the lower two contain the
slender tributaries of the larger whole above.
Blackness comes with the territory and is in the
material. It is both the darkness of Te Po, a point
of origin, and a destination, representing as it
does ethnic identity and, more recently,
solidarity.

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No cry baby, Hutchinson adds her tears to
those of other Māori artists who have dealt with
loss of land, when she was commissioned to
make this work for the Population Health
building at Tamaki. She invoked the spirit of the
recent Ngai Tahu Claims Settlement Act (1998)
where the cultural, spiritual, historic, and
traditional association of the iwi with the Waiau
River was asserted. She upholds the mauri of the
Waiau River in its critical relationship with Ngai
Tahu whanui as it arises from the mountainous
spine of the South Island, crosses the southern
edge of the Hanmer Plain, flowing through a
gorge to emerge onto the northern part of the
Culverden Plains and then flowing inevitably
eastwards to the Pacific Ocean. She depicts the
story of the river symbolically, with inverted
triangles representing the Waiau-uha (Waiau)
and the Waiau-toa (Clarence) Rivers which in
Māori lore were originally male and female spirit
lovers that dwelt in the Spenser Mountains.
Transformed into adjacent rivers, which flowed
faster when warm rains melted the snows, these
parted lovers lamented their separation in
Spring, swelling the river waters with their tears.
Her sculptural practice has evolved beyond
the clanging of symbols to include some
personal references. As she notes, “I’m
developing my own visual language and that is
really important for an artist. It’s not that I’m
copying or appropriating symbols all the time. I
use a lot of cultural symbols in my work, such as
the kowhaiwhai and the frangipani motif, but I’m
developing a lot of my own motifs and I’m
starting to combine them with some of the
cultural motifs.”

Banished to the corridors outside the
classroom for disruption during her schooldays,
she has succeeded in making a triumphant
emblem out of the paper darts she once threw.

Linda Tyler

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The Artist

Born in Auckland in 1963, Hutchinson is of Maori and Samoan descent. She was educated at Unitec in Auckland, and has received residencies in Christchurch, Canada, Chile and Australia. Her range of multimedia works are exhibited in New Zealand, Australia, Canada, and Dunedin.